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Objective-C Enters Top Ten In Language Popularity
bonch writes "Objective-C has entered the top 10 of the Tiobe Programming Community Index. Last year, it was at #39. The huge jump is attributed to its use in iPhone and iPad development. C, of which Objective-C is a strict superset, has reclaimed the #1 spot from Java, which slides to #2. Tiobe also explains how it determines its rankings."
Don't they just google it like the rest of us?
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There is one popular computing platform that requires all programs to be written in Objective-C. There is another popular computing platform that requires all programs to be written in one of the many languages that compile to verifiably type-safe CLR bytecode, but Objective-C is not one of those languages. So if I want to develop an application for both of these platforms, in what language should I express the business logic of the application so that it can be automatically translated into Objective-C and into a CLR-friendly language?
They use search engines to determine this?
Why does this seem odd to me... or even misguided?
Embedded Systems. There's lots of work there. And we're getting more valuable all the time, because Universities are increasingly teaching C#, Java, etc. The number of people out there who can program a microprocessor right down to the metal is dropping each year.
Unfortunately the number of projects that require people who can program right down to the metal has also been dropping each year.
From this I conclude that the results are meaningless. At best it shows that Objective-C programming has resulted in more discussions and questions. Whether it is "popular" or not is a bit more subjective.
of all the posts on Slashdot saying how much it sucks.
On the higher end platforms, this is true. Projects based on ARM, PowerPC, Infineon Tri-Core, etc projects are definately using a higher level of abstraction, with more developers programming at those levels, and a small number working in device drivers and board-support packages. \ But the flipside is that intellegence is being distributed into lots of devices (automotive being the best example, but also appliances, utility meters, medical devices, etc). Most of these run on small, self-contained micros which cost only a few dollars. C is far and away the language of choice on these platforms. Developers with the knowledge to allow you to get every last drop of performance out of a $2.37 micro, so you don't have to buy the $2.52 one, are in great demand. When you build 100,000 of something, you can afford some up-front development cost to save $.15
If Tiobe's website is to be believed, the #1 programming language right now is Whitespace.
Dislike the Electoral College? Lobby your state to join the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact.
Where are the C development jobs? I have strong C skills, but everything is Java/C++/PHP/Ruby/worse.
Worse? Fortran? Cobol? Ada?
Dare I say, Intercal?
Brainfuck?!
The enemies of Democracy are
Agreed. My first thought was, "Yay, I'm not the only idiot out there programming with VB!", but after reading that, it's more like, "Yay, I'm not the only idiot out there having problems coding with VB!"
All kidding aside, Objective-C isn't the sort of language people use because they want to. Rather, they use it because it's what Apple says they can use.
Back in the NeXT days, we used it because it was far better than anything else out there. But that was 20 years ago. Times have changed, and we have better programming languages available to us. Even with Objective-C 2.0, it's still somewhat of a relic.
So it's popularity isn't natural. It's almost fully artificial, based upon the restricted nature of Apple's platforms, especially the mobile platforms where they've literally "outlawed" everything else.
Visual Cobol.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
The reason Java and other languages are more prominent these days is because they are more suitable for most business requirements - reliability, scalability, portability etc. Unless an app has to hit the metal, or has hard speed / memory / CPU requirements, chances are C is not the right language to write in any more.
After about two years programming Obj-C/Cocoa for iPhone apps, I can't believe that this ancient experiment in OOP by an amateur compiler writer is still around. Even though it is nominally a compiled language, all the calls to methods as well as accesses to class properties are interpreted -- the name of the method & its args (args have names) is looked up in a hash table by runtime interpreter to find the address, then to push args and call it, every time you invoke it or access a property. The Obj-C creator basically didn't know how to code linker-loader address binding and so he just left that part for the runtime to decode on millions of end users CPUs from there on. He also didn't know about name mangling, and left that part of his job for the future programmers to do manually (method names and args are explicitly named, so you end up with arg named calling methods like [obj method:arg1 count:count]). For adding properties to a class you have enter the same info in triplicate (variable delcaratiom, property declaratiom, getter/setter declaration), so there is lots of cut & paste, doing by hand the job that compiler should have been doing. The syntax is very clunky, inelegant, uneconomical on programmer's time e.g. requiring lot's of jumping back and forth to match/complete nested square brackets, again simplifying compiler writer's job at the expense of busy work for countless programmers from there on.
In addition to performance & narrow technical issues, the worst fundamental flaw of Obj-C is that the creator didn't understand the value of name space partitioning in OOP (the key tool for building layers of abstraction), so much of that's left largely to programmers, which in Cocoa (API, like win32) resulted in mind-numbing hyper-verbosity, with each class and method names dragging huge repetitive prefixes, with each name spelling out explicitly its whole ancestry back to the stone age. While the Xcode editor is doing heoric efforts in trying to guess what you meant and offer auto-completion of the names as you type, that is the lesser half of the problem (you still end up doing lots of cut & paste of the Cocoa names). The main drawback is when trying to read or modify the code later -- even the simplest algorithm looks complex, any pattern specific to the task at hand is drowned in the mind-numbing sea of repetitive Cocoa verbiage.
In short, horrible language & API framework. Only someone who grew up with this and never knew anything better could love it. Of course, like everything Apple, buried under the idiotic Coca+Obj-C layer, there are gems of genius, especially the extremely well thought out functionality and high performance graphics & animation engines.
This.
Objective-C has a lot of buzz, since Apple has a lot of buzz. That doesn't mean it is getting used in a lot of projects, just that a lot of people are talking about it. Just because there isn't a lot of chatter online about something, doesn't mean it isn't used.
For example I suspect C++ is actually much higher. Why? Because it is the language of video games by and large. Pretty much any PC and Xbox 360 game are written in C++, usually using Visual Studio. However you don't see a lot of chatter about it online since it is being done professionally and it just kind of an assumed thing in the games industry.
Well, that makes for a rather large amount of apps out there, even if they don't get talked about all that much.
Likewise, though I suspect C is high up on the list due to embedded applications, I think that their data on it is flawed. The reason they see so much is likely Linux, which of course uses a lot of C. Fine, but Linux also gets talked about a lot online, since it is open source. So the amount of discussion it generates in relation to code is much higher than a commercial project.
In general their methods are rather flawed.
The whip and high heels.
ARGH! Stop artificially inflating VB's results by using VB's name twice in a post!
Once you start despising the jerks, you become one.
Steve Jobs had enticed Xerox Parc people to Apple, then NeXT. So this methodology seemed advanced at the time. Also Objective-C was commercially supported while C++ was still basically an open-source hack in the mid-1980s. I was an independent NextStep developer. It was unclear what would win. But as usual cheap and open beat a language you had to buy.
:-), the new MacOS was NexTStep layered with old Mac APIs.
When NeXT took over Apple (oops I mean the other way around
A simple analogy:
"Strict superset" is to "superset" as ">" is to ">=".
I've never understood why Apple has such an obsession with Objective C. To me it really does seem like being different for the sake of being different.
After you use it for a while it grows on you substantially.
It's simply a different path than other languages have chosen, but it has a lot of power - like KVC observing of property changes on objects, or the way I can use categories to extend libraries I don't have code for.
And hands down Interface Builder is the most usable GUI development tool I have ever used, which stems directly from how Objective-C interacts with objects. In every other language I ended up abandoning GUI design tools to code UI by hand, but IB is a major partner in every iPhone/Mac UI I write.
Yes the syntax is verbose but so what? Modern editors (like XCode) code complete a lot of that typing for you. And in any programming, the actual coding is small compared to thinking about approaches to a problem - so in the end it's not that much different time-wise to actually produce working code.
On top of that though, I think there's an overall savings in time with really well thought out foundation libraries and language abilities that lead to faster coding over many other languages.
I've used a number of other languages really heavily, from Java to C++ to Scheme - and I think Objective-C in the end, is a really good language combined with very good tools from Apple.
I've never really seen the point in pining for other languages that do not philosophically match the platform you are targeting. When I was doing some Windows development I used C++ and the MFC. And though I could use other languages targeting the Mac or iPhone, I never much saw the point in doing so when learning the languages the core foundation libraries were written for gives you an insight into how they are likely built and meant to be used.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley